Jan Owen

Born in Adelaide, Australia, Jan Owen studied arts at the University of Adelaide, where she earned her BA. She raised her children and worked as a librarian, tutoring in the Library Studies Department at the South Australian Institute of Technology, before turning to her own writing. Her poetry collections include Boy with Telescope (1986), winner of the Anne Elder Award and the Mary Gilmore Award; Fingerprints on Light (1990); Night Rainbows (1994); Eating Durian (2002); Timedancing (2002); Poems 1980–2008 (2008); the CD Laughing in Greek (2010); The Offhand Angel (2015), a volume of her translations of Baudelaire’s poetry, Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, (2015), and a book of limericks called The Wicked Flowers of Charles Baudelaire (2016).

Intellectually curious and wide ranging in her work, Owen contemplates family, travel, history, and childhood in both free verse and traditional forms. The Australian Poetry Review described her work as moving “from the microscopic to the cosmic; from the present to the past (and vice versa); from the local to the exotic; from the abstract to the embodied and from the act of representing to the act of meditating.”

In 2016, Owen was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal. She has also received the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize, the Max Harris Award, and the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Her translations of Baudelaire’s poetry was long-listed for the 2016 National Translation Award in the United States. She has traveled widely and was a fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. She has also participated in the Festival International de la Poésie at Trois Rivières in Québec.